“Vast changes are often made up of tiny interactions, the smallest choices and happenstances that can reverberate and build to change the very nature of the landscape. Every creature carries a legacy of the past as it walks toward a future it will never see, an ecosystem in itself and part of webs too large to perceive. Plant and animal shade into each other, and bring each other into existence through nothing more or less than an ongoing relationship. What might grow tomorrow, only tomorrow can tell.”

            —Riley Black, When the Earth Was Green: Plants, Animals, and Evolution’s Greatest Romance (St. Martin’s Press, 2026), p. 201